Claire DeWitt And The City Of The Dead Part 24

"Really," I said.

He mumbled something under his breath.

"You want a dollar?" I said. I was worried about a rebellion of men on the church steps. "'Cause I really don't have a cigarette."

He smiled. "Yeah," he said. "That'd be nice. Thanks."

I reached into my pocket and found a five-dollar bill and gave it to him.

"Thanks," he said again. "Bless you."

"You too," I said.

I stood up and my head spun. I sat back down.

"Hey," the man said. "How about you? You want a cigarette?"

"Sure," I said. "I'd like that."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a half-smoked 100. I took it and he lit it for me with a matchbook.

When he lit the match, he saw the b.u.mp on my head.

"That don't look good," he said, frowning.

"It don't feel good," I said.

The cigarette tasted good. I sat and smoked it. The man pulled a pint bottle out from his overcoat and opened it up and handed it to me.

"Thank you," I said. I took a long, burning sip and handed it back to him.

"You welcome," he said. The man smiled. As I looked at him his coat kind of shook and then rattled. I thought I was seeing things, but then something crawled out from the coat and onto the man's shoulders.

It was a rat. A pretty, clean brown and white rat.

"Oh!" I said.

"That's Boo," the man said. He reached a hand up to pet the rat.

"Hey, Boo," I said. I reached out to pet him, but Boo shrank away.

"Sorry," I said.

"That's okay," the man said. "He just shy."

We pa.s.sed the bottle for a while, not a good idea if you might have a concussion, but a good idea if you're depressed and lonely and it's four o'clock in the morning in the most G.o.dforsaken place in the USA and you are very, very thirsty.

We drank for a while and then we smoked more half-cigarettes. Then he pulled out one of the long brown joints and we smoked that.

We talked about the storm. The man told me he'd hidden in a spot he knew, a spot he would not reveal, but from which he could watch all the madness of the city without being seen by any authority.

"You leave people to their own, woulda been fine," the man said. "Once the cops and the Guard come in, start telling everyone what to do, that's when it gets all f.u.c.ked up."

"I have great faith," I said, "in people's ability to f.u.c.k things up without the cops."

The man laughed.

Me and Boo had been eyeing each other the whole time. Now, finally, he leaned in closer to me. I reached out my hand and let him sniff it. His sharp little nose took in everything. He made a face like something smelled foul. That means something coming from a rat.

"I know," I said. "It's been a hard night."

The rat looked at me and leaned toward me, moving his whiskers up and down as he weighed what I'd said. I held my hand still. Finally he sat back down on the man's shoulder. The man smiled.

"That means he like you," the man said. "He don't like everyone. That means you can pet him."

With one finger I petted his soft, clean little head. "Hey, Boo," I said. "You're a good boy."

"He is that," the man said proudly. "He a real good boy."

I scratched the top of his head. He seemed to like it.

Boo's owner turned to the men behind him. "Hey, Jack," he said. "Look at this. Check it out."

A big lumbering shadow came toward us. Between the play of lights and my head injury and my general intoxication, it looked like a shadow cast by a backlit giant. The shadow came into focus as a man in a big overcoat.

"Boo don't like just anyone," the shadow said. I thought the voice was familiar, but I couldn't...

"He sure don't," Boo's owner said.

The shadow got closer and I felt its eyes on me.

My head spun. I looked back at the shadow, but now it wasn't a shadow anymore.

It was Jack Murray.

"Come on, DeWitt," the shadow said. "You and me, we going for a walk."

I followed Jack, walking silently behind him. He wore the same tired overcoat from Congo Square, over an old suit that might have started off as any color but was gray now. He took us to the Moon Walk, the pathway by the river. We took up a few benches, and his strong unwashed smell was enough to guarantee our privacy. I was far from sober but I managed to get out a few questions, and I was just sober enough to remember his answers the next day. I remembered his face wobbling in the dark, spinning-or so it seemed to me-lit only by our cigarettes, or maybe they were joints, or maybe freebase, or maybe wet, the same long brown cigarettes soaked in poison I'd been smoking. Or maybe I should just say we each held something small and burning but I don't know what. I forgot my questions, but I remembered Jack's answers.

"I knew Vic from way back," Jack Murray said. "We went to nursery school together, me and him. All the way up through Tulane. Two good little boys from Uptown, me and Vic." He laughed. "Yes. I do know what happened to him. But you got to find out for yourself, DeWitt.

"You got all the clues you need. You just got to put them together. You trying to think with your head. But you got to remember what the man said. There ain't no coincidences. Believe nothing. Question everything. Follow the clues. Especially the first one."

And later, after we'd smoked too much of whatever we were smoking and had drunk twice as much as was wise: "Now, me, I'm happy with my lot," Jack said. His face was calm above the light of his cigarette, his eyes clear and intent. "I solved my mysteries," Jack continued. "I found my answers, and that's between me and G.o.d. Me and G.o.d and no one else. I know it looks like I got nothing, but I got everything. I got my peace and that's all I ever wanted. You, DeWitt, I don't envy you. You still got a long way to go. I feel for you, 'cause you're gonna go to h.e.l.l and back before you solve your mysteries. You already halfway there, but that ain't nothing."

I was just sober enough to remember I'd never told him my name.

"Being a good detective, see, people think that makes it easy for us," he explained. "But it makes it harder. Maybe some things come easy to you, but that just means you gotta do more. It means more's expected from you. It means you got a place, and that place needs you. It means there's a job for you. A job that only you can do. It means there's a book out there that only you can read. Constance knew that," he said. "She knew the truth isn't always in a book. It isn't always in a file, or on a piece of paper somewhere. It can be buried like a treasure. It can be in the sky. It can be in the water. It can be in here." He looked at his PCP-laced cigarette. "It can be inside you, in your own heart. You can leave little bits of it everywhere, once you know how. That way it's only for the people who have eyes to see. Ears to hear. You make it easy for people, you ain't doing 'em no favors. See, she understood. You can't do someone's job for them. You can't solve their mystery for them. Even after they gone, you can't solve it. It just go unsolved until they come around again. All you can do is hold it for 'em till they get back.

"She ain't teach you everything, not by a long shot. There's a lot you still got to learn, DeWitt. She still teaching you. But you gone and closed your eyes. You shut your ears. The whole world teaching you. The whole world your school. But you stopped listening, just 'cause you lost your favorite teacher."

And later, he said: "Now us detectives, our reward's in heaven. We ain't get much here on earth, but when we go upstairs, we gonna get ours. I been promised that, and I believe it. But a man like Vic, he don't know about that. He think he got to take his reward right here. So what was his reward?"

"I don't understand," I said. "How do I find that out?"

"I already told you too much," Jack said, scowling above the red light of whatever he was smoking. "And that's all I'm gonna tell you. That's all I can tell you. You got to find the rest out on your own. You got to find your own buried treasure, girl. Solve your own mysteries. I solved mine. I f.u.c.king been to h.e.l.l and back, but I solved mine."

I had a hard time staying awake. But I wasn't so drunk that I didn't see the tattoo above his heart when he reached into his chest pocket, looking for a cigarette b.u.t.t.

Constance.

"I tell you one more thing," Jack said, before he left me alone and disappeared. "If you hoping for a happy ending, DeWitt, you lookin' in the wrong city."

47.

I WOKE UP ON a park bench in Congo Square. I was panting. I heard a shrill squawk in my ear.

It was my phone. I picked it up and checked the display. It was Mick. It was one in the afternoon. I ignored it.

I stood up, dusted myself off, and found a taxi to take me back uptown to get my truck.

I'd lied to Andray. There was no way I was leaving New Orleans.

"Not one detective in a thousand will hear my words," Silette wrote, "and of those, one in one hundred will understand. It is for them who I write."

Detectives are superst.i.tious, and over the years people started to read more into Detection. It was code for a secret plan. If you said it all at once, without stopping, you could crack any case. If you put every seventh or ninth or forty-fourth or one hundred and eighth word together you would get something that meant something else. It hadn't been written by one person, but by a secret cabal of detectives. It was a channeled message, and Silette didn't understand it any better than the rest of us.

People thought that because they didn't understand. They weren't the one in one hundred in one thousand.

Silette hadn't written for them. He had written for me.

48.

I WENT BACK to my room and went back to sleep. When I woke up again it was dark. I went to a restaurant on Frenchman Street and ordered sunny-side-up eggs. But when they came, they didn't look like eggs at all. They looked like something terrible and inedible. They looked like punishment.

It's a great thing to be at rock bottom, I reminded myself. There's nowhere to go but up.

After breakfast-or maybe it was dinner-I called Mick. I didn't plan on telling him what had happened with Andray. On a different day it might have been fun to break his heart. Not today. I told him I'd fallen asleep early the night before and hadn't learned anything new.

Then I told him my truck had died. I asked if I could borrow his car, a dark gray sporty little Nissan from 1990-ish.

"Died?" he said.

"Well, hopefully not died," I said. "That would be sad. But it's not running."

"Won't the rental place give you a new one?"

I exhaled a loud, annoyed sigh.

"Then you call them," I said. "Maybe they can give you a car before noon tomorrow, which probably means four or five. Maybe for you they'll have a spare car of any kind at any price, because for me they certainly-"

"Okay," Mick said. "Okay. Take a cab on up and meet me here. Give it back to me tomorrow morning."

I went back to my hotel room and got my gun from where I'd hidden it in the box of tissues in the funny little slot hotels always have, as if there were something untoward about a bare tissue box. I gave it a quick check for functionality, and when everything looked good I went back out and got a cab on Decatur to take me uptown. Mick met me out in front of his place. He gave me the keys to his car with some instructions: Sometimes the lights stick and you have to jiggle the thing a little. Sometimes it stalls at red lights. The driver's window only goes down halfway and then you have to push it down, but don't because it's a b.i.t.c.h to get back up.

I'd forgotten what it's like to be poor.

"So where are you going?" Mick asked. "Did you get some leads, or-"

"Nope," I lied. "No leads. No plan, really. Just figured I'd drive around and see what happens."

Mick nodded and pretended he thought that was a good idea. I knew he didn't.

He would have liked the truth worse.

It was less than five minutes from Mick's house to Central City. Andray and Terrell were in the same place on their regular corner. Some other boys were with them, but I didn't recognize any of them.

Terrell saw me first. He nudged Andray and pointed me out. They thought, of course, that I was Mick. I drove past them and parked at the end of the block. Andray walked down the street to see what I-Mick-wanted.

He came to the car and leaned down toward the window.

I rolled it down and pointed my gun at him.

"Surprise," I said.

Andray ran. He ran back into a house nearby, probably to go through a back door and come out on the other side of the block. I drove around the block until I saw him running out of the front yard of another house. I left the car running, jumped out, and caught him on the corner, just as he was about to step off the crumbling curb and into the street. I grabbed Andray by the shoulder with one hand and pointed the gun at him with the other. Both of us were panting, our breath visible in the cold air.

Andray rolled his eyes and tried to look blase and tough. But for a second he had the same look he had had on his face when I first saw him. As if he were drowning. As if he hoped I would just shoot him already and get it over with.

It pa.s.sed as quickly as it had come.